Greatest of Rings

M57 – the Great Ring Nebula. That dim, barely discernible deep sky object is the first that I spied in my 4 1/2″ Newtonian – and what propelled me towards upgrading to my 8″ CPC-800. The photos I’ve taken periodically haven’t amounted to much. M57 is a small object to capture with my 40D DSLR […]

Comet 21P/

I got a few exposures of comet 21P on July 20th and made them into a mini-movie: This is six frames of 3-minutes each. A small tail is beginning to form, and I was able to observe this visually in addition to what’s seen in these exposures.

Bode’s Cigar

We had another great night of observing at Norton Cemetery on May 12th. Early thin clouds gave way to improved seeing and transparency as the night progressed, with great views of Jupiter. Sometime I’ll experiment with planetary imaging but I’m not set up for it yet. Rather, I took some four-minute exposures of M81&M82 (Bodes […]

Whirlpool of a night

The darkest night and best transparency I’ve seen in quite a while finally arrived. It was a bit cool, but I got some terrific views of Jupiter and the Whirlpool Galaxy. Jupiter was nearly at opposition and looked great – the biggest and brightest I’ve seen. Four cloud bands were clearly visible as it rose […]

May day – warm at last!

May 1st, finally a night that wasn’t freezing! Tonight’s forecast had vacillated between mostly clear and partly cloudy, but I’d decided that tonight was a night I’d be going out – no matter what! Mother nature has been brutal. Two days ago Lake Placid saw several inches of wet snow, and we had plow-able snow […]

Updated Andromeda Photo

I’ve been working a bit on my March 19 wide-field image of Andromeda. There’s not a lot of signal in that two-minute exposure and I’ve had to stretch it quite a bit. I used bad pixel mapping this time instead of dark frame subtraction to remove the hot pixels from my Canon 40D and a […]

Celestron Wedge – Rubs the Wrong Way!

I almost got out tonight to observe the Orion Nebula, but the weather didn’t quite clear early enough, and it’s already only 36 Fahrenheit! I decided to add this blog post instead. My Celestron wedge developed an annoying little problem which I repaired a few nights ago. Here’s what I did…

Andromeda in the Woods

Here’s the result of processing a wide-field view of Andromeda, taken on March 19: This was a 2-minute piggy-back camera exposure with a 50 mm lens. In other words, with the camera sitting atop the CPC-800 telescope and tracking the sky. An equatorial wedge was used to eliminate field rotation during the 2-minute exposure.

The Ubiquitous ST-4 Port

Many telescope mounts have ST-4 auto-guider ports, including my Celestron CPC-800. My ASI120MC-S camera includes a “ST-4 compatible” auto-guider port and came with a cable for connection to the telescope mount. I wanted to know more about how the telescope responded to inputs on the ST-4 port.

Resetting the GPS – Again!

I mentioned a couple of days ago that my GPS failed again for the third time! Well, it doesn’t really fail, but rather gets confused. It’s an annoyance. I reset the GPS module last night and its working again. Still, it’s a pain in the butt. I’ve written up the procedure in this .pdf file: […]